Changes In The Works For Canadian Development Aid Approaches

This came out late March, and I first posted it to the CAIDC blog.

From CBC.CA ...

Is the Harper government changing the aid game?

Last Updated March 21, 2007

By Robert Sheppard, CBC News

Two almost throwaway lines in the new federal budget have Ottawa's foreign aid community in a tizzy and appear to signal a new direction for how Canada's now $4.1 billion in annual development aid will be delivered abroad.

One was the statement that the Conservative government intends to focus traditional bilateral aid on fewer countries where "we will aim to be among the largest five donors in core countries of interest."

The other was the pledge to "put more of our staff in the field, allowing us to be more responsive and make better choices on the ground."Of the two, the second may be the more surprising and follows strong criticism recently of the Canadian International Development Agency — that it has too many of its administrative staff in Hull rather than out in the field, which has been the trend of late among some of the more aggressive European nations such as Britain.

Both the Senate foreign affairs committee last month and a C.D. Howe Institute study a year ago took CIDA to task for being overly administered and overly centralized. The Senate committee, for example, noted that nearly $12.4 billion in Canadian aid has been sent to sub-Saharan Africa since the late 1960s, but that fewer than 20 per cent of the CIDA staff members devoted to these programs are actually on site to administer the funds.

But if sending more CIDA officials off "into a lot of sweaty capitals in the Third World" is an unexpected policy twist, focusing Canada's aid on a much smaller group of countries will be the more substantive, notes development expert John Richards of Simon Fraser University in B.C., where he is a professor of public policy, and one of the authors of the C.D. Howe report.

The previous Liberal governments had already signalled a shift to a more concentrated foreign aid approach: It had narrowed the list of Canada's main so-called development partners to 25 countries and was planning to increase the amount CIDA spent on these countries from 42 per cent to 66 per cent of its budget by 2010.

Canada's development 'partners'

in order of aid received

* 1. Bangladesh
* 2. Ghana
* 3. Mali
* 4. Mozambique
* 5. Ethiopia
* 6. Tanzania
* 7. Vietnam
* 8. Indonesia
* 9. Ukraine
* 10. Senegal
* 11. Pakistan
* 12. Malawi
* 13. Bolivia
* 14. Burkino Faso
* 15. Kenya
* 16. Honduras
* 17. Guyana
* 18. Zambia
* 19. Rwanda
* 20. Niger
* 21. Sri Lanka
* 22. Cambodia
* 23. Cameroon
* 24. Nicaragua
* 25. Benin

Have the Conservatives changed this list of 25 partners? It's not clear. They haven't spelled anything out yet and CIDA's president Robert Greenhill is not commenting at the moment. An official with International Co-operation Minister Josée Verner said the minister would be willing to answer questions later in the week.

But the aim to be "among the largest five donors" in certain countries could signal a fairly substantive shift in priorities, some suggest, and Richards says the Stephen Harper government looks like its being "a lot blunter about this than the Paul Martin people."
150 countries eligible for Canada's help

At the moment, Canada's international aid budget is on a roll, part of the Liberal-initiated plan to double it, in nominal terms anyway, by the end of this decade. It rose by 17 per cent this year and is to go up by a further seven per cent to $4.4 billion in 2008-09.

But that amount still only represents about half the 0.7 per cent of GDP that activists like singing star Bono and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been urging Canada to take on. What's more, what aid money does go out is spread among an unusually large number of recipients.

The 25 "partners" receive somewhere in excess of 42 per cent of Canada's international aid budget (it's difficult to judge at the moment because large chunks, $100 million last year alone, have been hived off for Afghanistan). But according to CIDA's website, in excess of 150 countries are eligible for Canadian aid, though in practical terms the number is closer to 70 or so. And of course all have their political constituencies here to press their case.

When the Senate foreign affairs committee held its hearings, groups questioned why Canada was giving development money to China, one of the emerging powerhouses of the world, instead of their favoured recipients, or Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons.

Even the list of 25 has its political component: Ukraine is on it, for obviously political reasons, observes Richards, and the 14 African countries are almost equally divided between English- and French-speaking nations.

The big question, however, is whether this list will change given the now-stated ambition to be "among the largest five donors" in the countries Ottawa hopes to help. No one has crunched the numbers yet, perhaps not even CIDA. But from what has come out in earlier studies, Canada is only among the top five in a handful of countries it tries to support.

Among them are Haiti and Afghanistan, two countries not on the list of 25 partners.
Tracking donations important

Targeting donations is clearly the emerging trend among donor nations. The Brits do it. So do the Scandinavian countries, which can focus on about a dozen or so countries.

"You have a negligible impact if you're just dribbling out your aid," says Richards. "The rationale for aid is not just to dole out money but to have influence over the host countries. It sounds a bit neo-colonial. But if Canada wants to be any kind of actor in this game, it has to step up and become a significantly important donor."

Giving more money, however, also means tracking its use more carefully. Are the teachers really teaching in that school you built a year ago? Are doctors making the rounds of the clinics as they promised?

This is one of the rationales for having more development officers on the ground in the host countries. But it's a much more expensive proposition for agencies like CIDA.

It experimented with decentralization, as it is called, a decade or so ago and the result was that administrative costs soared, fuelling a reputation that has stayed with the agency even today.

One of the goals of this shift is to bring administrative costs down, the finance minister said in passing. That could be hard to do if you are sending people out to the field.

Voting With Your Wallet For A Better World

If, like me, you support the concept and practice of fair trade practices, you will be encouraged by Better World Shopper.

It is a site dedicated to providing comprehensive, up-to-date, reliable data of the social and environmental efforts of major global companies.

Their assessments are based on a comprehensive database of over 1000 companies and utilizes 25+ reliable sources of data to assess companies along five major areas:

1. HUMAN RIGHTS: sweatshops, 3rd world community exploitation, international health issues, divestment, child labor, code of conduct.
2. THE ENVIRONMENT: global warming, rainforest destruction, pollution, recycling, renewable energy, greenwashing, toxic waste, eco-innovations, illegal dumping, sustainable farming.
3. ANIMAL PROTECTION: factory farming, animal testing, humane treatment, wild animal habitat.
4. COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT: family farms, local business support, volunteer efforts, sustainable growth, philanthropic donations, nonprofit alliances, establishing foundations.
5. SOCIAL JUSTICE : fair wages, fatalities, union busting efforts, health & safety records, discrimination based on: race, gender, age, ability, religion, sexuality, ethnicity.

The Plight Of The Rohingya

The human rights situation in Burma has led to thousands of people of various ethnic groups fleeing to neighboring countries. The Rohingya Muslims from Arakan state are vulnerable as they have no legal status in Burma and are considered to be non-citizens. The plight of the Rohingya demonstrates how people without citizenship rights in their own country can be forced out and become refugees, leaving them still vulnerable and without citizenship in the country of asylum.

I first met this situation head on when I arrived in Mae Sot, a Thai town on the Burma border, that is known transfer point for migrant workers, both documented and not, to enter Thailand in search of better opportunities.

Two hundred Rohingya Muslim refugees, all men, had paid several hundred dollars each to human traffickers to smuggle them out of Burma, and take them to Malaysia. After a harrowing 9 days at sea in an open boat, with little water and food, they were abandoned in northern Thailand. Fearing deportation, they had taken refuge in a small mosque, where they now live in dismal conditions.

The plight of the Rohingya in Thailand presents the dilemma of undocumented migrants. They are unwanted in Thailand, and Burmese immigration law has stripped away Burmese nationality from the Rohingyas, making them foreigners in their own country. And, the sad reality is that as Muslims, they are particularly unlikely to be accepted for third country resettlement in the security environment prevailing in the post-9/11 world.

The Rohingya have faced continuing persecution by the military government in Burma, and have escaped to to neighbouring countries in large numbers. The Burmese government has created a complicated system of bureaucratic conditions and procedures, which make it very difficult for refugees to be cleared and repatriated. Even though the Government of Thailand wants the refugees to leave, there is a very slow rate of repatriation.

The Rohingya's Plight In Burma

The Arakan State of Burma is inhabited by two ethnic communities, the Rakhine Buddhist and the Rohingya Muslims. The Rakhine Buddhist is the majority group and is close to the Burman in terms of religion and language, while the minority group, the Rohingya Muslims, is ethnically and religiously related to the people from the region of Chittagong in southern Bangladesh. The Rohingya Muslims number approximately 1.4 million.

The Rohingya have been in Burma since at least the twelfth century and often coexisted relatively peacefully with the Rakhine Buddhists. However, under the military regime of General Ne Win, beginning in 1962, the Muslim residents of Arakan were labeled illegal immigrants who settled in Burma during British rule. The government at the center made efforts to drive them out of Burma, starting with the denial of citizenship. The 1974 Emergency Immigration Act took away Burmese nationality from the Rohingyas, making them foreigners in their own country.

Following the takeover of the country by the military in 1988, there has been increased army presence in Arakan state. This build up has been accompanied by human rights abuses, and the Rohingya continue to face discrimination. They need authorization to travel outside of their villages, their land is confiscated by the government for use by Buddhist settlers, their mosques are destroyed by the military and they are routinely subjected to forced labor.

While there I had the opportunity to attend the mosque and meet with many of the refugees. The desperation among them was palpable: many have no idea of what to do, or where to turn. This situation represents an urgent need for civil society working in the region to work together in an integrated solution.

Educating The Children of Undocumented Migrant Workers

One of the three thematic areas that SEARCH, the project I am working with in south east Asia, works in is in building the capacity of civil society who work with migrant workers.

I had an opportunity to spend some time at an innovative school operating in northern Thailand, near the Burmese border, that provides schooling to the children of migrant workers, both documented and undocumented, who have come over from Burma in search of work.You can read more about the plight of Burmese migrant workers in Thailand in this Amesty International report.

The education of undocumented or migrant children poses unique social, political, and educational problems for receiving countries such as Thailand. The NGOs that work in this area have an uneasy amnesty with the governments of the countries in which they work, who cannot be seen as providing tacit support for what is illegal migration.

As well as the constant fear of arrest and deportation, social and educational opportunities among migrant workers and their children are typically hindered by frequent moves, poverty, gaps in previous schooling, and language barriers. And poverty, language, and cultural differences add to the challenges posed by mobility, the identifying characteristic of migrant students. Moving from place to place makes it difficult to attend school regularly, learn at grade level, accrue credits, and meet all graduation requirements. It is also difficult to participate in socializing activities and create the social networks critical to social mobility. Migrant students also confront serious societal and institutional barriers.

This school seeks to overcome these barriers by providing free, basic education and meal services to the children. They provide transportation to and from the school, and also seek to address their unique educational needs. On the day I was there, the students were seeing a video and attending classes designed to educate them about their rights and to avoid becoming victims of exploitive child labour.

The Central Market Of Phnom Penh

While on my mission, I spent some of my down time at the Central Market in Phnom Penh.

It was a fascinating, colourful place, where produce, foods and goods of all sorts are bartered and sold.

This unique, art-deco building is a Phnom Penh landmark and was built in 1935-37. The entrance to the market is lined with souvenir merchants hawking everything from T-shirts and postcards to silver curios and kramas.

I have posted some photos of the market here.

Cambodia

One part of my mission to south-east Asia is to perform a scoping mission to Cambodia, to assess the viability of establishing a knowledge management platform for the National Aids Authority.

I spent three days in the capital Phnom Penh, meeting with a series of officials from AIDS and HIV organizations.

Cambodia is in many ways, a beautiful country, and a very sad one.

It seems to be struggling to come to some closure from its horrific recent past. Just thirty years ago, Cambodia was ruled by the Khmer Rouge who changed the official name of the country to Democratic Kampuchea, and was led by Pol Pot.

Pol Pot

The Khmer Rouge lauched a ruthless campaign to eliminate people deemed to be "enemies of the state", whether they were linked to the previous regime, civil servants, people of education or of religion, critics of the Khmer Rouge or Marxism, or simply offered resistance to the brutal treatment of the cadres. An estimated 2 million people were either killed and many more driven from the country in the short four years that Pol Pot was leader.

During his time in power Pol Pot instigated an aggressive policy of relocating people to the countryside in an attempt to purify the Cambodian people as a step towards a new society. In 1979, he fled after an invasion by neighbouring Vietnam which led to the collapse of the Khmer Rouge government. Ultimately, Pol Pot was never brought to justice and he died, while in hiding, in 1998.

Diary Of My Recent Project In South East Asia

From June 16th to mid July I am in south east Asia working on several projects. I am conducting the training on a knowledge management system I set up for the SEARCH project, a CIDA funded project that is working with civil society in the region: undertaking a scoping mission for the establishment of a knowledge management system for the National Aids Authority in Cambodia; and acting as the production coordinator for a documentary film being shot in Thailand and Loas.

I will be uploading updates and photos and videos as I can: please stop by often to see the updates!

Dialing For Prosperity: How Cell Phones Are Having A Positive Impact In The Developing World

When I was last in Malawi, I was surprised by how prevalent cell phones had become, even in that poor nation: it seemed everybody had one.

I was working alongside a South African consultant. She mentioned that the cell phone was fast revolutionizing micro-finance in the shantytowns of her country by allowing micro-entrepreneurs a tool to communicate with and reach their customers. She predicted it would have far reaching impact in many developing nations.

So, it was with great interest that I heard about the study by Robert Jensen, a development economist at Harvard University, who has completed a study of the economic benefits obtained by fisherman in a region of India from the adoption of mobile phones in 1997.

Jensen was able to show that the spread of cell phone coverage had had a very beneficial impact on the fishermen in that region. As phone coverage spread, fishermen started to buy phones and use them to call coastal markets while still at sea. The proportion of fishermen who ventured beyond their home markets to sell their catches jumped from zero to around 35% as soon as coverage became available in each region. At that point, no fish were wasted and the income of the fishermen stabilized and increased.

The Economist did an article the Jensen study on entitled "To do with the price of fish". It's an interesting read, and an insightful look into how technology can help lift the economies of developing nations

Open Source Software A Viable Alternative To Expensive Commericial Programs

A few weeks ago I got an email from a friend who was thinking of buying the new MS Office, and wanted my opinion on it. This started a discussion around how to use the many free software programs out there in stead of expensive, licensed systems.

As I pointed out, you don't need to drop a bundle on good work and communication software. You can find free and sometimes better alternatives.

Here is a copy of my email:

Hello:

I avoid MS aps where I can. The cost issue is one thing, but also MS
is targeted so much by the virus hackers that security is a huge issue
for me.

For Word, Excel and PowerPoint I use the free open source program at
OpenOffice.org - it replicates everything that the MS Office suite
does and includes desktop applications such as a word processor, a
spreadsheet program, a presentation manager, and a drawing program,
with a user interface and feature set very similar to MS Office. It
also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including
those of Microsoft Office.The price is right. MS Office goes from
between $149 to $699.27. Open Office goes from between $0 to $0.

Not only will you save yourself a bundle now, but you'll save yourself even more on upgrades in the future as you will no longer be locked into Microsoft's viscous cycle of forcing MS Office upgrades by changing the "doc" and "xls" file formats: OO does a good job of keeping up with the newer MS Office file formats. And, OO also has a portable version that you can load up on a Flash drive and take with you, so if you are working at a work station that does not have OO on it, you can run it off your Flash drive.

If you need to do any higher end photo editing/graphic work, I would look at The GIMP (a.k.a. GNU Image Manipulation Program) as a free Photoshop substitute. You'll need to download the GTK+ Runtime Environment for the GIMP to work, but complete instructions are here.

For desktop publishing, I would look to Scribus, an open-source program that provides professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output. Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation..

For email, I use GMail exclusively. It offers a huge amount of room -
around 3 gig I think, so filling it almost impossible. It also uses
the great Google search engine so finding old emails is a snap. I also
like the way it organizes emails into discussions.

For calendaring I use G Calendar. G Calendar uses the universal iCal
format, so if you have a PDA you can import/export events back and
forth. And always being able to access your calendar anywhere you are
online is a huge plus. Another option is to look at Thunderbird, the open source free email
program and Sunbird the stand alone calendar, both are from
Mozilla.org and together they mimic just about everything that Outlook
does.

For collaboration sites, I would suggest looking at the various
high end open source CMS programs. On of the better ones, and a very
turn key application, is Drupal (drupal.org) which offers Content
Management Systems, Blogs, Collaborative authoring environments,
Forums, etc. Again, it is free, and support is available from a very
active developer community.

One of the best sites on the Net to get such software is download.com.
It provides reviews from both editors and users, and provides full yet
concise descriptions for a vast array of software that is available
for download and links where they can be accessed.

Hope this is helpful.

Scott

When Generation D(igital) is Also Generation G(lobal): The Impact Of Culture On The Development and Implementation of Tech-Enhanced Education Part II

Last week I presented at the Tel@York conference. The session was video taped, and will be available in a week or two on their web site: I'll post the URL when I get it. In the meantime, I thought I would share with you some of the highlights of what I discovered doing my research.

Who Is Generation D?

• Born between 1980s – 1990s
• Other terms to describe
• Generation Y, Echo, Newmils, Thatcher’s children, Generation Next, Net Gen
• Tolerant
• Positive
• Nurtured by “Helicopter Parents”
• Likely to be more conservative than Xers and Boomers

Howe and Strauss (2003), identified seven core traits reflecting the general personality characteristics of Generation-D. These traits are:

1. Special
2. Sheltered
3. Confident
4. Team-oriented
5. Conventional
6. Pressured
7. Achieving

Strong Independence: The typical Gen Der has a strong sense of independence & autonomy. Gen D's unprecedented access to information also gives them the power to acquire the knowledge necessary to confront information they feel may not be correct.

The Four I's

Inclusion

• Gen D are moving toward greater social inclusion with technology, not exclusion. Their creative processes show a move toward global orientation in all of their activities.

Investigations

• When it comes to technology, Gen D's initial focus is not how it works but how to work it.

Innovation

• Gen D live and breathe innovation, constantly looking for ways to do things better. These expectations of constant change and the ability to build or construct experiences have implications in our classrooms.

Immediacy

• Interactivity and the speed of digital technology have greatly increased the process of communicating. What used to take days or weeks, now takes seconds.

Digital Prosperity and Progress

As someone who works, on occasion, in ICT4DEV ( information and communications technology for development, I have always been interested in what impact ICT projects can demonstrate in the developing world

In a new report,the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation ( ITIF is a non-profit public policy think tankthat seeks to advance a pro-productivity, pro-innovation and pro-technology public policy agenda internationally) examines the impact of IT in five key areas:

1. productivity
2. employment
3. more efficient markets
4. higher quality goods and services
5. innovation and new products and services.

The report finds that the integration of IT into all aspects of the economy and society is creating a digitally-enabled economy that is responsible for generating a great deal of economic growth and prosperity, including in developing nations. Read the whole report here.

The authors lay out five key policy principles for digital prosperity:

1. give the digital economy its due
2. encourage digital innovation and transformation of economic sectors
3. use the tax code to spur IT investment
4. encourage universal digital literacy and adoption
5. do no harm ( which sounds a lot like Google's corporate mantra of Do No Evil)
   

The Future of Wikipedia

If you spend any time on the Net, at some point you cannot help but stumble over or in to Wikipedia. In the papers that the students I teach hand in, it is a common reference point, and I have noticed it also being used more and more in mainstream media.

It now boasts 845,000 articles in English alone, and continues to be one of the most visited sites on the Web - the 37th most visited according to a CBC article that is now a year old: in the 12 months that have since passed I suspect it has become even more popular.

But, as popular as it is, concern continues about its accuracy.

The openness that makes Wikipedia so alluring to its adherents is precisely what discomfits its detractors. Since anyone can post the site is in a constant state of flux — which creates plenty of opportunity for inaccurate information to be uploaded.

But does that happen?

In 2004 Dr. Halavais a professor at State University of New York at Buffalo decided to test the system. Adopting the pseudonym "Dr. al-Halawi a visiting lecturer in law, Jesus College, Oxford University," he placed 13 errors into its various articles. Less than three hours after he posted them, all of his false facts had been deleted, caught by the Wikipedia editors who regularly check a page on the Web site that displays recently updated entries.

Nature did a study, comparing Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica. For its study, Nature chose articles from both sites in a wide range of topics and sent them to experts for peer review. In the end, the journal found just eight serious errors in the articles and four came from each site. All told, Wikipedia had 162 errors while Britannica had 123.

However, as encouraging as these are, I wonder if Wikipedia will ever turn the corner, and become an accepted research source. For now, I use it strictly as a preliminary source. I never use it as a sole source for my consulting or teaching work, and always cross-reference anything I do with another source.